Tim Wong is an insatiable opera buff who judges productions from a design as well as a musical perspective. He is co-founder of the design agency Howoco.

Are infographics changing the way we think?

I’ve been asked by one of our clients, National Grid, to sit on a panel of judges for a student design competition at the London College of Communication. The brief is to design an infographic that shows how fundamental the National Grid is to our daily lives (which it is, though I bet you never think about it).

It’s quite a challenge. How can we capture visually the many ways energy is generated, transported, bought and sold, and consumed. Is it going to be a map? A lot of numbers? A gaggle of icons? A timeline? All of the above?

Infographics are trendy. You’ve probably encountered a handful since waking up today because they're everywhere: in magazines, newspapers, brochures, online. Between 2010 and 2012, the Google search for "infographic" has increased by an eye-popping 800 per cent. We clearly have an insatiable appetite for them. Where did all this come from?

One of many online infographics explaining the plot of Inception

Information graphics were not born yesterday – they are centuries old. Edward Tufte, an American statistician and academic, wrote a series of books on the visual representation of data. One of the stories he recounts is a classic of medical detective work: how the mystery of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London came to be solved. The outbreak was concentrated around Broad Street (today’s Broadwick Street in Soho). Scores died or fled the area and the authorities had no idea what caused it.

A Dr John Snow, as quoted in Tufte’s book Visual Explanations, decided to plot a map of where fatalities occurred. What seemed like random happenings suddenly took shape: the highest concentration of deaths was around the Broad Street water pump (preserved today as a historical artefact). Cause and effect were instantly established.

Fast forward to 1995. The celebrated architect Rem Koolhaas and graphic designer Bruce Mau published a seminal tomb called S.M.L.XL. The book is a compendium of Koolhaas's work through the years, but this is no portfolio picture book. Using diagrams, maps, sketches, projections, Mau weaves together a symphony of visual storytelling through data. The internet age quickly latched on to this potent language and appropriated it for publications such as Wired.

No matter what the subject, infographics are popular because they perform a number of tasks very well:

1. They are the filter through which we navigate our multimedia lives

Does the popularity of infographics represent a change in the way we think about problems that’s been forced upon us through the complexities of technology and the modern world? There’s simply too much information and too little time. Data boom means we want our information in bite-sized chunks. Twitter is part of this new way of consuming information. We need words to be short – and, wherever possible, with pictures and diagrams and icons.

From Wired magazine

In a way our brains have been reprogrammed within this very saturated graphic environment, so we need graphics to understand data. According to research, 90 per cent of the information that comes to the brain is received and processed visually because it’s most likely to stick in our long-term memory. Businesses and media know that, and they use this method to imprint that information on to our brains: ignore the noise – this one page of numbers is all you need.

2. They illuminate complex situations in multi-angled and non-linear ways

There’s often no prescribed order to which one approaches an infographic. Now that we have the opportunity to crunch data quickly, the non-linear presentation taps into people’s ability to think laterally. There is a much more active engagement because we make the links ourselves. Many stories can be told from multiple viewpoints – infographics encourage us to jump around and still get the picture. The classic narrative structure is broken down. Order is not dictated. We play with information – which leads me to my next point.

3. Gamification of serious information breeds comprehension

Why read a 1,000-word op ed on the ramification of an imagined US/Israel military operation against Iran when you can play a game and decide for yourself – as I’ve helped Tom Rogan to visualise on his Telegraph blog post recently.

The truth is, we love games. Every other post on Facebook is a game from Buzzfeed – classic decision trees/wizards. Tom Rogan’s infographic is far more thought-provoking but employs a games language to engage us. Hard data and serious news presented as games appeal to our childish delight where conventional presentation would bore us rigid.

Gamification of data is often harnessed for educational purposes and is increasingly recognised in the corporate space: according to Gartner, by 2015, more than 50 per cent of organisations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. In this way the information is less threatening, less of a chore – more of a challenge. Gamification uses motivational techniques that game designers have used for years to activate our engagement with the "Big Data".

4. We love sharing pictures

In our multi-connected social media world, it’s pictures that we love to share. Sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr encourage us to shape our world visually. We want pictures. A whole generation is now obsessed with selfies. Even when you encounter a bon mot by the great and good on Facebook, they’re presented as pictures. Infographics makes data easy to share. We share them when they’re useful, but more often, because they entertain us, like the one here in the National Stereotypes series.

So this is the question: is our reliance on infographics a function of technological progress? Or is it that the world is getting so complex that we have to find a way to present things differently? It’s chicken and egg and I don’t have the answer.

Because of the prevalence of this form of communication there’s even more need to call for intelligent and brutal culling so we’re not just throwing numbers at people. There is a danger of democratising data so they become a lot of facts with no meaning attached. You can’t argue with the numbers, but at the same time they’re not really saying much either.

So what’s next? When something reaches such mainstream popularity, surely the only way to go is down? Well, yes and no. The need to explain complex ideas using graphic visualisation will always be here – if it survived cholera it’s not disappearing anywhere soon. The more novelty infographics may disappear. We’re moving into interactive, animated and motion graphics, as seen here below. The medium of film takes engagement to another level – we’re emotionally keyed in.

I'll be very interested to see how the students of London College of Communication respond to the National Grid brief.

Why I haven’t presented this post as an infographic? Well, they require a huge amount of time, and I’m just too busy making them for my clients. I usually blog about opera so perhaps sometime in the future I’d do you an infographic of the leitmotifs in Wagner's Ring Cycle. Now that really is a tough one…